How Aggressive Should Tesla Be with Variable Pricing to Manage Supercharger Congestion? (i.e. Should Tesla jack rates at chronically congested SCers?)

[lensovet]

The Supercharger there has been designated as "congested" continuously for literally years

This is also literally not true. Currently shows 7/10 free and Tesla’s own historical chart shows that it’s never above 50% today.

Now, take a charger in the middle of SLC, and it’s a completely different story as expected. Only time it’s not considered congested is after 9 pm and before 8 am. Nothing surprising there.

 

[Unclepaul]

Point is that Tesla wants you to get in and out of the Superchargers as fast as feasable. Staying longer to get the last 10% cloggs up busy locations, so people need to wait in line for you to finish your leisurlely meal.

Latest software updates integrates AI to determing not only which locations are congested, but also those that probably will be congested when you get there.

Tesla will continue to tweak their policies to provide the best possible overall charging experience.

 

[Rocky_H]

ABRP says an ancient X 75D could do this in 73% driving at the speed limit. It’s only 111 miles.

ABRP I think is still treating those as if it's a brand new 75 battery with no degradation, which isn't how this really is. And did you have it set for below freezing temperatures, where it has to use heat? Also, the Burley station was added pretty recently. This was much worse when people had to go all the way to Twin Falls. So reality has a couple more factors.

This is also literally not true. Currently shows 7/10 free and Tesla’s own historical chart shows that it’s never above 50% today.

I will give more detail then. This was not 10 stalls for most of these last several years of experience when it was constantly full. It was only 6 stalls until some extra temporary ones were added at the end of November 2022. That's why it shows 10 stalls now. Most of the times I have been there over the last few years, it gives the message about it being a high usage station and reduces my charge limit down to 80%. The high usage messages and 80% capping does happen a bit less frequently now.

How about you listen to the person with a lot of firsthand experience with this route instead of arguing?

For an even more problematic example, the Boise to Winnemucca route is difficult too. McDermitt just got completed very recently, and when my friend drove Boise to McDermitt recently, he said it was a very tight stretch even starting from a full battery with his P85.

And those are just a couple of examples. Boise up to Coer D'Alene is 379 miles without a Supercharger yet, so that may also have a place or two that require full charges when it eventually gets built to be usable at all.

 

[lensovet]

Who cares how bad it was 2 years ago? These charges aren't being retroactively added to your previous charging sessions when Burley was not online and Tremonton had 6 stalls. It's being added now, as more stations continue to be built and most current stations have less than 100 miles of driving distance between them (Tremonton to Burley is 110). Did your friend tell you about how many stalls were empty at McDermitt, which was built with 8 stalls for a route in the middle of nowhere? 5 have to be in use for the charges to even kick in.

The estimation was based on today's weather with 5% degradation. But it's irrelevant regardless as that car had FUSC when it was sold and therefore won't be paying these fees. Boise up to Coer D'Alene through Oregon and Washington has SCs spaced every 80 miles or less and is only 10 minutes longer driving time compared to going entirely through Idaho.

 

[M CARLING]

Economics 101 teaches that the reason why it’s important for prices to be adjustable is that price setting is (by far) the most efficient way to match supply and demand. Without congestion pricing, people will be stuck queueing for crazy times to get the charge they need.

My wife worked for Tesla for more than five years. On travel holidays, we would work at a highly congested supercharger location managing the queue, giving out bottles of water, and answering any questions about Tesla that drivers (or interested members of the public) would have. Based on that experience, drivers generally hated waiting to charge — and that was when we would text them that they would be up soon and could return to their car to plug it in.

 

[philander]

I'm in favor of any pricing that discourages suburban tesla owners from using SCs for primary charging locally and gets them off their asses to install a L2 connector at home. In Illinois this is even more ridiculous given access to hourly pricing plans, overnight it's regularly $0.03-$0.05/kWh, yet all I see are rows of occupied $50K EVs crowded into SC's paying $0.45/kWh because they can't find $750 to get a L2 connector installed in their garage.

I think another way to combat urban/suburban SC overcrowding would be Tesla finally extending the supercharger fee experience to their Gen3 adapters. Aside from condo associations and HOA's, if golf courses, movie theaters, corporate parks and anywhere else people park for extended periods had the ability to easily set rates and access, they'd roll out L2 connectors in droves. I have no idea what could be holding up that particular show at Tesla, it seems like something that should have been a feature of the 48A adapter as soon as it was released.

 

[brkaus]

@philander apparently they are rolling billing for gen3 connectors. Min install size 4.

In certainly reduces the overhead from ChargePoint fees, but still not sure there is an ROI (but haven’t really calculated anything).

 

[lensovet]

they'd roll out L2 connectors in droves

Plenty of non-Tesla options out there today that offer this. The economics don’t really make sense. Up front costs are going to be huge, especially for entities that have zero in-house expertise for designing and building these installations.

 

[David99]

Pricing will not be able to fix a demand that is higher than the available stations. You can only shuffle demand around so much. If demand is higher, no amount of optimization will fix the root problem of not having enough chargers. Regular commerce is happening during the day. People are on the road during the day and need to charge during the day. It simply isn't realistic to expect people to go out at midnight to charge their cars. Home charging isn't an option for the majority of people living in cities where the congested superchargers are. Congested stations are already a pain. It's busy getting there and out, you have to wait and the charge rate is lower. No one wants to charge at a busy station, they *have* to. They have EVs and no home charging. Making it more expensive when the demand is the highest is just a punishment without a wrongdoing.

The only way to solve this issue is making more charging stations available. And by that I don't mean only superchargers. Over 90% of the time, a cars just sits somewhere parked. We need L2 chargers literally everywhere. I mean everywhere. Mostly at workplaces. People go to work and leave their cars parked for 8 hours. That's the #1 place where charging stations would be needed but even in 2024 this is still rare. Imagine just like handicapped parking is mandated everywhere where cars can be parked, there would be a mandate for L2 chargers. Every store, every mall, every public parking structure should have sufficient L2 chargers. The LAX parking structures now have over 500 L2 chargers. That's how it's done right. People are flocking to Superchargers because the alternatives are not there.

 

[E90alex]

I think Tesla should include a total cost estimate into the supercharger screen in the navigation. That might help push people to a lower cost, less congested supercharger.

I don’t think people can conceptualize how much difference for example $0.46/kWh vs $0.34/kWh is because they don’t really know what a kWh is and how many kWh it takes to charge the car.

But if the car said something like “Estimated cost to 80%: $23” at one charger vs “Estimated cost to 80%: $17” at another one, that’s a much clearer difference and I think people would be more willing to go a few minutes out of the way to save $6.

 

[David99]

I think Tesla should include a total cost estimate into the supercharger screen in the navigation. That might help push people to a lower cost, less congested supercharger.

I don’t think people can conceptualize how much difference for example $0.46/kWh vs $0.34/kWh is because they don’t really know what a kWh is and how many kWh it takes to charge the car.

But if the car said something like “Estimated cost to 80%: $23” at one charger vs “Estimated cost to 80%: $17” at another one, that’s a much clearer difference and I think people would be more willing to go a few minutes out of the way to save $6.

That's a good idea!

 

[thedanl]

I think Tesla should include a total cost estimate into the supercharger screen in the navigation. That might help push people to a lower cost, less congested supercharger.

I don’t think people can conceptualize how much difference for example $0.46/kWh vs $0.34/kWh is because they don’t really know what a kWh is and how many kWh it takes to charge the car.

But if the car said something like “Estimated cost to 80%: $23” at one charger vs “Estimated cost to 80%: $17” at another one, that’s a much clearer difference and I think people would be more willing to go a few minutes out of the way to save $6.

I personally use a metric of just multiply by 10 and you're roughly in gas price numbers. In your example that comes out to $4.60 per [unit similar to gallon of gas] vs $3.40 per [unit similar to gallon of gas]. Interestingly, these numbers are similar in price as well as usable energy. A gallon of gas has around 30 kWh of energy and with a thermal efficiency of about 30% that comes out to 10 kWh of useful work. So I think a price per 10 kWh puts things into a frame of reference in which people have knowledge and intuition built around.

 

[3sr+buyer]

I think Tesla should include a total cost estimate into the supercharger screen in the navigation. That might help push people to a lower cost, less congested supercharger.

On the navigation screen, if you tap a Supercharger, a sidebar will pop up showing the hourly prices, hourly estimated demand, and current hour. Not sure if this is a recent software update.

Even without tapping, the Supercharger icons show the number of free spaces.

 

[lensovet]

Yes, but no one is going to do that when planning a route. Point is that just like time to destination the car should show cost to destination.

 

[FastEddieB]

Yes, but no one is going to do that when planning a route. Point is that just like time to destination the car should show cost to destination.

An option to “MINIMIZE CHARGE COST” when planning a route would be nice.

 

[Earl]

An option to “MINIMIZE CHARGE COST” when planning a route would be nice.

I'm afraid there are too many variables to be able to realistically optimize this. The main one is time. How valuable is your time? Others are:routing, distance traveled, driving speed, reliability, courage to go to low SoC, etc

• One can sit around, waiting to charge until rates drop but that will take more time.
• You can use a free DoT charging station at a rest area in some places but that is glacially slow (25 - 50 KW)
• One can stop at an RV park and use the 14-50 or TT-30 outlets, sometimes for very little
• You can find free Volta stations at malls but have to wait for hours for someone to free one up, then spend much of a day there.
• Once can fully charge at a place that charges per KWh, then stretch to another, possibly bypassing those that charge more or per minute.
• One can stretch to a free or cheap charger with a high risk that TANSTAAFL and you could get stuck with a broken charger and need a tow.
• If you drive at 30 mph or forego climate control, you can get a lot farther between charging and have to charge less.
• etc.

 

[Rocky_H]

I'm afraid there are too many variables to be able to realistically optimize this. The main one is time. How valuable is your time? Others are:routing, distance traveled, driving speed, reliability, courage to go to low SoC, etc

I don't see why that would be true. You're saying this can't be done because it should optimize by time. But the point of @FastEddieB 's feature idea is to have the option to prioritize for price OVER time. If that's a preference the user wants to prioritize by compromising other things, then the car certainly has enough information to at least select and display a route that does that. No one is saying the driver is then forced to use it if they are uncomfortable. And the suggestions about TT-30's and stuff are really irrelevant. We're just talking about Supercharger selection on a route here.

 

[Earl]

I don't see why that would be true. You're saying this can't be done because it should optimize by time. But the point of @FastEddieB 's feature idea is to have the option to prioritize for price OVER time. If that's a preference the user wants to prioritize by compromising other things, then the car certainly has enough information to at least select and display a route that does that. No one is saying the driver is then forced to use it if they are uncomfortable. And the suggestions about TT-30's and stuff are really irrelevant. We're just talking about Supercharger selection on a route here.

I suppose if you constrain yourself to Superchargers only, it may be easier to optimize with fewer constraints, however, i'd be surprised if, with the possible exception of time-of-day, you would see much price difference between viable routes.
A possible exception might be your Boise to SF Bay Area where you can opt for dropping south through cheaper NV and minimize your time in expensive OR and CA.

 

[Rocky_H]

I suppose if you constrain yourself to Superchargers only, it may be easier to optimize with fewer constraints,

Well....yeah. That's what all of this discussion has been about for the last several comments. It's selecting something on the car's navigation screen, and it picks the route with the Supercharger stops. Having a couple of preferences of what to optimize for is the topic.

I always hated how the "Beta Trip Planner" had the preference set for fewest number of stops, and there was no way to change that. It picked insane things with what Superchargers it was selecting. This just makes sense that shortest time or lowest cost should be other preference options.

A possible exception might be your Boise to SF Bay Area where you can opt for dropping south through cheaper NV and minimize your time in expensive OR and CA.

I don't think that's an odd exception case that is unique to me either. A few years ago, I drove from Boise to Kansas City, MO to visit my mom. I was looking at whether I should do I-70 or I-80 or some combination of them, since you could have about the same distance or time with either but they run through different states. For someone paying for Supercharging, cost difference might matter there.

 

[Earl]

It picked insane things with what Superchargers it was selecting. This just makes sense that shortest time or lowest cost should be other preference options.

Yep, I just finished a 2300 mile roadtrip. I blew off most of the Supercharger recommendations from the nav. It was helpful but, like autopilot, I can still do better than some neural net built by a bunch of Si-Valley software geeks.